This is the story of a photo that ended one era and started a new one in my photography. I hope it will illustrate the difference between shooting for yourself, and shooting for others. As I was writing my post about the most important question every photographer should be able to answer, I found myself getting into this story, but it felt like a tangent that was distracting from the point of that post. So I decided to give it its own spinoff here.
I was feeling stuck (elsewhere in life more so than in my photography). I was trapped behind an obstacle that didn’t seem to be a problem for anyone else. It was hard not to focus in on it, despite the fact that it should have been a small, inconsequential thing. It was taking my attention away from all the good, bright parts of my life, and I seemed to be forever stuck contemplating its darkness, unable to progress past it. Somehow, all of these feelings coalesced into this composition.
Sets of footprints indicate that the rock didn’t slow anyone else down. But my road led directly to it. The rock is dark and heavy in the composition. It’s rough, shadowed, and cold. Due to the rock’s visual weight in the frame, my eye comes back to it when I try to look away. It’s in focus, and literally takes the focus away from what might lie beyond, as the background gets ever blurrier, fading into the distance. And yet, most of the frame is full of calm, light tones. There are many paths around the rock. All it can do is sit there, and I’m free to move past it whenever I like.
Nobody looking at this photo sees any of that. They see a relatively boring photo of an unremarkable rock sitting on a snowy path. When I shared this photo shortly after taking it with a critique group, I had someone tell me that it didn’t tell any story, and if the tire tracks had curved around to avoid the rock instead, then it would be a good picture. Another critic said “the photographer doesn’t understand composition and hasn’t learned to expose for snow.” If I had received feedback like this even a day before I took this photo, it would have really disheartened me. But when I read it, I actually laughed out loud. Of course it told a story. It told a story of a personal struggle of mine, and it told it more clearly, poignantly, and succinctly than any amount of words could tell it. The composition deliberately enhanced the photo’s ability to tell the story. It told that story to me, and it also helped me to transcend that personal struggle, and see it in a new light. It gave context to the actual size of my struggle in the greater canvas of my decidedly wonderful life. And eventually, I realized that I didn’t need the photo to tell that story to everyone. I just needed to get that story out for myself.
Bruce Barnbaum is one of my favorite photographers, and also pretty involved in active environmentalism. In one of his books, I forget which, he talks about a photo he took immediately after losing an important legal battle; trying to conserve some forested land from a developer or similar. Critics panned the photo and said it didn’t fit in with the rest of the photos in a gallery exhibit of his. But the photo helped him work through the darkness and anguish he felt.
He also tells a story about a photo he took that is widely misinterpreted. The photo is the stump of a gargantuan tree, surrounded by 50 or so saplings growing around it. Barnbaum says that the thesis of the photo was that the tiny saplings growing were a poor replacement for the huge, ancient, majestic tree that had been cut down and lost. But everyone seeing the photo just said, “Wow, nature nature is healing!”—the polar opposite of what he was trying to convey.
The point here is that photography can be extremely cathartic, but when you’re photographing as a means to express yourself, don’t be surprised if that message doesn’t come through very clearly to viewers that don’t have the context you do surrounding the image. Maybe in another 50 years, I’ll have figured out how to get my photos to convey complex emotional thought processes to all of the people who see them. Probably not. But in the meantime, I feel great about just taking photos that tell important stories to me.